This is the story of how I have arrived at this point without getting into dull Dickensian description or some morass of pointless self-promotion.

Let me begin by saying I was raised in a philosophically open family. My family encouraged me to use my mind and my imagination, to explore and discover. There was no such thing as taboo. Now I can look back and see where the roots of my vampirism are in my own upbringing. I was raised to be open and aware, and so I have continued to be.

My "awakening", as it were, happened on August 6, 1985--the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Actually, that was the day when months of self-examination and reflection crystallized for me. I was not yet 14 years old. I hadn't known the words "empathic" or "psionic" and consequently could not have used them to describe what I had been experiencing. I knew I was living with a different and heightened set of senses, and that the whole of me hungered and yearned for something I couldn't identify.

I had come into the sphere of House Maidenfear, a vampire sanctuary, months before through initiated friends that seemed to really understand what I was experiencing. On that day, the puzzle pieces of my thoughts clicked into place. I too was a vampire. I decided that I would never deny that aspect of me--in fact, I could never deny it. I would embrace vampirism and my existence as a vampire.

For the following four years I spent a great deal of time at House Maidenfear, learning and developing my own abilities. My own initiation was in 1989, once I turned 18. However, I had to take the Maidenfear Way and my own life as a vampire on an adventure. I moved away to college, where I studied history and linguistics and became an expert vampire researcher. I was able to enhance that skill in graduate school in Florida. Wherever I went, I made connections with the local vampire communities. I came home to House Maidenfear in 2001 and I was elected to my current station in 2003.

I came to call myself Sappho after a thorough reading of her poetry. Her words have such an ability to wrench deep emotional energy that I came to regard her as something of a vampire herself.

I'm known affectionately as the "Vampire Philosophe" for the amount of time I've spent in the more cerebral aspects of the vampire existence. Here are a few of my thoughts.

There exists an entity of living energy all around us and in the universe. I mean that this energy is both alive itself and imbues all things with life of one degree or another. A vampire is an adept at energy play, an adept at tapping into this living energy for self-benefit. For some this is achieved through drinking blood, for others it is a matter of psychic living energy. A vampire knows how to take what energy they want and need and use it for their own purposes.

I believe we as vampires are at an exciting time in our history. At no other point in the history of the world have circumstances been so ripe for us to fully express ourselves and be true to what we are. My commitment to the vampire community is to help us achieve our greatest potential.